Writings about music from a Dublin-based composer.

Tag Archives: Tool

I have no issue with the project itself; it’s a rather interesting one, and on further inspection Bartholomäus Traubeck seems like an interesting artist. But the way the website “SpiritScienceandMetaphysics.com” (at this point, every nonsense detector flag I possess has been raised) portrays it is entirely misleading.

It is not what it sounds like when you put tree rings on a record player. It’s what it sounds like when software designed to interpret visual data from a camera pointed at a disc of wood on a turntable is connected to a synthesizer. They explain this in the body of the text, but not after the linkbait-y title has done its job of drawing in readers, and without ever bothering to link to the artist himself. (Here is the project’s page on the artist’s website.)

They then follow it up with “It makes you wonder what kind of music other parts of nature would play.” Well, it makes me wonder how other natural materials could be used as data to generate music according to schemes created by composers, sure. If anyone has an old turntable and some wood, let’s make an honest video with their title and see how it sounds.

But I guess “This is What Happens When Specially-Written Software Looks at Tree Rings and Processes it and Outputs it as Synthesized Piano Which is Then Played to an Audience With Significant Biological and Cultural Reasons to Hear Patterns in This Kind of Sound” isn’t really stop-the-presses material.

Not only does this site offend me by posting this rubbish (with echoes of so much other natural medicine/spirituality nonsense that you find online), and the text of the article diminishing the composer’s agency in the whole process, the YouTube video is posted by some seemingly-defunct channel that has no other related content or link to the artist, even though the artist has his own video on Vimeo:

So as well as actively harming people with illnesses through the dangerous things they post about cancer and medication, they also don’t seem to care enough about art give direct pageviews to the artists they write about.

I look forward to seeing their banner art on the cover of Tool’s next album though.